40 Years On: The Cultural Revolution
May 15, 2006
FORTY YEARS ago today, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party released a notice that formally launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, resulting in a decade of chaos and economic stagnation that allowed the irrepressible Chairman Mao Zedong, sidelined by the pragmatists and disgusted by the "Khrushchev-type revisionism" in the higher echelons of the leadership, to seize control once again after the unparalleled catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward.
News about the anniversary in the state press is, naturally, conspicuous by its absence. The essayist Ling Feng explains that there are several reasons why the current government is hoping to keep a lid on any commemorations. Simply put, the persecution of as many as 100 million Chinese people is the worst thing that the Chinese Communist Party has ever done, and to publicize these events would damage the fragile image of a ruling party already racked by dissent and discontent. Furthermore, the Party has already achieved "closure" of a kind, saying in its daintily titled 1981 Resolution on Certain Historical Problems since the Establishment of the Nation that the chaos was, erm, Mao's fault, of course, but that his mistakes were "used" by a counter-revolutionary clique led by his appalling wife, Jiang Qing, and his second-in-command, the phobia-ridden megalomaniac Lin Biao. All correct discussions are restricted to the old formula that Mao was "70% right and 30% wrong" and had, in his dotage, been led astray by the Gang of Four, and anything that might draw attention to the fact that, well, if there was indeed a counter-revolutionary clique, then Mao was its undisputed leader, has to be forbidden, as it would undermine the very foundations of the Party's right to rule, Ling writes.
The President of China's Independent PEN Association, Li Xiaobo, explains that guilt plays a part in the silence that now surrounds the Cultural Revolution. It was, after all, a movement that swallowed up the nation's youth and spat them out into an orgy of violence against their families, their communities, and more often than not, each other. Like all such mass movements, the Cultural Revolution rested on a sense of shared guilt, a complicity with the violence of the regime. Few could remain untouched. Those who managed to keep their integrity usually paid a heavy price.
Wang Lijuan, making a similar point, says that many of the people responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the Cultural Revolution are now in positions of authority. Some, no doubt, recall only their persecution and overlook the part they played in the torment of others. There were those, undoubtedly, who enjoyed at least some of their experiences. Years of agonizing repression normally create spasms or orgiastic violence and the most devastating achievement of twentieth-century totalitarianism was its ability to combine the two. Mao, riding on the waves of resentment he had done so much to create, managed to manipulate the retaliatory urges of millions of budding Red Guards, coaxing them into denouncing their parents, throwing their teachers out of windows and torching museums, destroying libraries and desecrating temples. Mao required no innovation. Giving the oppressed a chance to be oppressors was a key part of Stalin's Soviet Union, and one of the ways he managed to persuade much of the benighted, put-upon population to participate in a Red Terror that would benight them still further.
Most of us have heard about the acts of cruelty, the shameless treatment of political enemies like former State President Liu Shaoqi and his wife, as well as the murder or hounding to death of writers, including Lao She. We have seen, too, the way education and cultural expression was attacked so savagely, allowing the Mao cult to fill all the gaps left by the uprooted "poisonous weeds". We have also heard the absurdities of official propaganda during the era, where men – anxious to stress the superiority of "red" over "expert" – would tell the world that they have overcome cancer – a mere "paper tiger" – through the use of Mao Zedong Thought.
But the Cultural Revolution remains contentious in its origins and its purposes. Was it a mere coup d'etat choreographed at Mao's behest by the mediocrities who came to be known as the Gang of Four, and motivated by the Great Helmsmen's frustrations following the failures of the Great Leap Forward and the attempts to restore stability by State President Liu Shaoqi? Was it, as some on the Left believed, an attempt – however misguided - to avoid Soviet-style bureaucratization, a way of keeping the revolution fresh and permanent, a way of breaking out of the impasse described by Milovan Djilas as the "new class" of apparatchiki who derived social and material status from their positions? Was it therefore a dreadful, destructive flaw in an admirable but doomed belief in the perfectibility of humankind? Was it, alternatively, a sign of the growing paranoia of the leadership in the face of threats from the Soviet Union, China's rival at the top of the international Communist movement? Perhaps, in Mao's mind, it was all these things. He believed he was the revolution.
The document released on May 16, 1966, the Message from the CCP Central Committee, was the latest salvo of invective in a war that had torn apart the top leadership. Mao had been cast aside after the country was left devastated by the Great Leap Forward, and the 1958 Five-Year Plan, in which the Leap played an overwhelming role, was abandoned and replaced by emergency measures to revive the economy. Mao was left to nurse his wounds and plot his revenge.
The key figure of Peng Dehuai, the redoubtable former Defence Minister who openly criticized Mao's Great Leap Forward at the Lushan Conference in 1960, appeared again in the form of an obscure play written by Wu Han, called Hai Rui Dismissed From Office. Hai Rui was sacked for criticizing the emperor's misguided policies, an obvious reference to Mao's denunciation of Peng at Lushan. Mao included Wu Han in a list of 39 artists, writers and scholars who were "reactionary and bourgeois", and Yao Wenyuan, Shanghai propagandist and future member of the Gang of Four, was ordered to write a denunciation of the play.
Yao's article was published in Shanghai, but the main organs of the State, backed by Beijing mayor Peng Zhen, refused to reprint it. The stand-off was resolved when Premier Zhou Enlai stepped in and urged the article to be published in the People's Daily. Meanwhile, Peng Zhen paid a secret visit to Peng Dehuai, now exiled in the Sichuan countryside, presumably to discuss how the leadership of Liu Shaoqi could defend itself against the attacks of Mao's ultra-left attack dogs.
A few years ago, you could still hear academics talking wistfully about Mao's dreams. According to the ideological argument, made by countless left-wing scholars in the West, the Cultural Revolution was the third stage in Mao's quixotic attempt to jumpstart the revolution. The Soviet Union had ground to a halt, replacing feudal hierarchy with an iron tier of bureaucracy and running the country through central command. Mao, according to the ideological argument, sought to break the stalemate, to involve the entire country in the ideological struggle. The first two projects in the attempt to bring the masses into the revolution – the Hundred Flowers Movement and the Great Leap Forward – had failed ignominiously, and for various reasons, but Mao could not accept that his plans were flawed. The failures were attributed to the evil machinations of class enemies, Khrushchev-type revisionists and counter-revolutionary cow-demons. The Cultural Revolution was his attempt to root them out, to rigorously re-educate the masses from top to bottom in the responsibilities of revolution.
Of course, the people were not up to it. Mao, bewitched by the ideas that the peasantry was a kind of blank canvas on which he could scrawl his dreams, could not create the conditions of purity that his theory required. He had sought to scorch and burn and destroy all evidence of man's flawed history. History survived.
But even as early as the 1970s, some – including the Sinologist Simon Leys - were already arguing that none of this had anything to do with the flaws of Marxism-Leninism and was merely an old-fashioned grab for power by the marginalised Mao and a manipulation of public resentment in order to destroy Mao's enemies. Jung Chang, like Leys before her, explains that there was nothing spontaneous about any of the acts of vandalism and brutality perpetrated by the Red Guards, and that the forces of anarchy had been carefully channeled in order to overturn specific targets. When they had completed their task, the Red Guards – consisting primarily of disaffected student youth – were exiled to the countryside to "learn from the peasants". Mao believed, sincerely one would think, that anyone who opposed Mao or anything Mao said was, objectively, an opponent of the Revolution. He was willing to overthrow the whole bloody lot of them in order to get back to the top.
Of course, many in the Party were, genuinely, obstructing Mao, parrying his attempts to use culture as his new weapon. Mao even feared a purge, followed by China's own attempt at "destalinisation".
The long-standing conflict with the Soviet Union ran through the whole movement, and combined old-fashioned geopolitics, new-fangled ideological disputes and real personal antipathy. Although he felt humiliated by Stalin, Mao accepted the status quo and his position as the junior partner not only in the Sino-Soviet relationship, but in the global Communist movement. When Stalin died Mao seemed to believe that he could assume the leading role, and didn't count on Khrushchev, himself a man of considerable insecurities, trying to lecture Mao on points of theory. Khrushchev referred to Mao in private as a "caveman Marxist". Mao, for his part, would soon be describing Khrushchev as a "revisionist" who had abandoned Marxism-Leninism. During their meeting in 1958, Mao sought to humiliate his Soviet counterpart with an impromptu swim in the Zhongnanhai pool. Li Zhisui, Mao's personal physician, wrote that "the chairman was deliberately playing the role of the emperor, treating Khrushchev like a barbarian come to pay tribute. It was a way, Mao told me…, of 'sticking a needle up his ass'."
Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Communist Party Congress in February 1956, where he denounced Stalin's tyranny, had left Mao reeling. If Stalin could be posthumously purged and made a pariah, the same, surely, could happen to him. Li Zhisui recalls Mao's anxiety over the period. According to Jung Chang, Liu Shaoqi was already joining in the anti-Stalin chorus by criticising Stalinist agricultural policies, and Zhou Enlai was getting in on the act by saying that China should not repeat the Soviet Union's mistakes.
According to papers declassified last week by the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the withdrawal of 1,390 Soviet experts from China on July 16, 1960 was the result of "doctrinal differences" between the two sides, and accusations by Moscow that China was trying to indoctrinate its representatives with heresies that "contradicted every other fraternal Party". This, of course, gave Mao the opportunity to blame the failure of the Great Leap Forward on the Russians, as Jasper Becker explains in Hungry Ghosts, and it would certainly help his cause if he could identify the various "little Khrushchevs" in his own Party who had sought to undermine his vision.
In Lushan in Jiangxi Province, the official line on the disaster – at least 30 million dead, by some counts – is visible on small, sad-looking signs mounted outside the meeting hall where Mao finally saw off Peng Dehuai. It explains that the withdrawal of Soviet aid combined with unfavourable climate conditions and "human errors" to create two years of devastating famine. At the time, however, the state was explaining – and publicising on big banners – that mere "ideological differences" had meant that China had to pay back its debts to Russia, causing massive levels of starvation.
It is not too big a stretch of the imagination that Mao himself, cosseted by advisors and cut off from reality, had actually persuaded himself to believe this explanation, especially in light of his growing resentments towards Moscow. One of the reasons why he had launched the Great Leap Forward in the first place was to show the world that his was the superior doctrine. To prove the point to Khrushchev, he had insisted on increasing grain exports to the Soviet Union even as the famine started to kick in.
By the time Liu Shaoqi had been arrested, he himself was blamed for the famine, accused of sabotaging Mao's policies. This further identified "China's Number One Revisionist" with Russia, and with Khrushchev. Also playing on Mao's mind, no doubt, was the visit of Peng Dehuai to Moscow and Eastern Europe in 1959 in a forlorn attempt to rally support against the Great Leap. He might also have brooded over the words of Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky, who, seriously drunk, had openly suggested ousting Mao during a meeting with Zhou Enlai and Marshal He Long in 1964. It seems that when all officials were effectively suspended from duty pending investigations in 1967, the key to their reinstatement was whether or not they could be linked in any way to Malinovsky or He Long.
How real was the Soviet threat? Mao was worried by the overtures Khrushchev was making to Eisenhower in 1959 (and would eventually accept a rapprochement with the United States in 1971 in a meeting with Henry Kissinger). A vicious border clash took place between China and the USSR in 1969, and the Chinese Communist Party's Ninth Congress in that year was held in conditions of absolute secrecy because Mao feared a Soviet attack.
Anyhow, this writer has actually heard someone say that the Cultural Revolution was in some way a good thing, because it smashed China's links to its feudal past and paved the way for the sky-high rates of growth since 1976. Freed from the burden of history, the Chinese people have, painfully it must be admitted, been able to liberate their minds. Fat chance, say the likes of Li Xiaobo, Ling Feng and Wang Lijuan. That will only happen after a free and open appraisal has been permitted. But maybe that requires another ten years.
